


When my soul was in the Lost & Found

by Petra



Category: Ashes to Ashes, Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Gen, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-29
Updated: 2011-04-29
Packaged: 2017-10-18 19:20:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/192345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/pseuds/Petra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Alex were at home, looking and feeling like herself only by dint of seriously hard work, she's afraid she'd hate Annie for doing it all so easily.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When my soul was in the Lost & Found

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Female Character Trope Fest](http://such-heights.dreamwidth.org/333494.html). Thanks to [](http://thatyourefuse.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**thatyourefuse**](http://thatyourefuse.dreamwidth.org/) and [](http://eisen.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**eisen**](http://eisen.dreamwidth.org/) for pre-reading.
> 
> Spoilers for LoM 2x08 and A2A 1x01.

The seventeenth question Alex formulates is "Who is Sam Tyler, really?" but it's too late for her to answer that question. He's nowhere to be found--even when he's looking at her from across the office--and his tapes and diaries are too far away to be of any help.

She tries asking his colleagues--Hunt, Cartwright, even Skelton--but none of them have anything like a real answer:

"He's a pain in the arse. Get back to work, Bolls."

"Sam? He is what he says he is. Always has been, since he got his head straightened out."

"Don't know, really. A copper, I guess?"

None of that is the least bit satisfying when what she really wants to know is whether he went through the same amazement on waking up in the wrong decade--and the right body, possibly--as she did, but that would have been in the paperwork, surely. She would have noticed it, and someone would have said, as they always do, "One of your special ones, Price?"

She's made a name for herself and kept herself in her current profession on the strength of that name. The sexually weird stuff, the ones where the normal constables retch thinking of the trouble and the hardened detectives go tight around the eyes, those are the ones where they call her in. Some of them look at her twice--looked at her twice, back home--but not once she starts talking.

She hasn't explained to anyone in quite a long time exactly why she has a thorough and encyclopedic knowledge of the intricacies of human sexuality, paraphilias, obsessions, but then barely anyone has been close enough to her to ask. She studies because she wants to be able to prove that none of them apply to her, or at least not to her identity.

No one here has questioned her right to wear whatever she pleases, including Sam Tyler, who's the only one who knows enough to look at her strangely. It is the single thing she appreciates about 1981.

"Are you feeling better?" Cartwright asks, her second morning there. Granger has already brought her a cup of tea--tannic, traditionally horrible, cut with something that might be sugar and might be rat poison.

"Somewhat." Any day that doesn't involve being shot in the head and waking up wearing a skirt that would embarrass someone with a fetish for exhibitionism is an improvement, Alex is sure of that. The scars on her breasts are still gone and her vulva still exists, and those are better than all the high-priced coffee in the world, even if they do require being in a subconscious construct of 1981.

Cartwright gives her a sympathetic smile. "It's just you looked like you wanted to be anywhere but here, yesterday. I've had those days--" she lowers her voice and glances toward the glassed-in office to one side of Alex's desk, as though Hunt's going to overhear her talking about Women's Issues and come storming out to protect the masculinity of his space-- "and I was hoping you'd got over yours."

Alex swallows, and swallows tea, before she can start to answer. It will be interesting if Annie's presumed problems become real, sometime soon. Interesting, gratifying, and an excellent exploration of just how far Alex's mind is willing to go to make her believe that she's finally the person she's always known she was. "That wasn't the issue, exactly."

"Oh?"

"It was a migraine," Alex says, grasping at straws and trying not to remember Sam telling her how he'd confided in Annie, and how it hadn't gone anywhere useful.

Annie's sympathetic look tells her that hasn't got her off the hook entirely. "Shaz gets those sometimes, too."

"Regular as clockwork, ma'am," Shaz says, though when Annie gives her a look she frowns down at her files as if she's not been listening, as if she's been working this whole time.

"Something to look forward to, then," Alex says, and drinks more tea.

Annie says, "About that Layton," and Alex tenses all over.

"They've not let him go."

"After what you found on him? No. The Guv was just wondering if you'd any more good information, or informants, to share. He's not one for keeping data separate."

Alex takes a deep breath, aware of the weight of her chest as she hasn't been since that first surgery. "Is that down to him, or down to Sam?"

Annie's laugh is soft and it goes right to the bottom of Alex's mind and tweaks. All of Annie does, if she's perfectly honest with herself; some women grow up feeling that they ought to be their mothers, or the antithesis of their mother. If Alex had sat down and tried to design a womanly woman, feminine to the tips of her fingers though she's not wearing nail varnish, she'd have drawn Annie. Decidedly not Caroline Price, whose political opponents had thrown the same sorts of terms at her--mannish, harpy, Amazon (when she barely cleared five feet two in heels)--as Alex has heard for years.

If Alex were at home, looking and feeling like herself only by dint of seriously hard work, she's afraid she'd hate Annie for doing it all so easily. But it's simpler here than it ever has been, the one point on which her dream is merciful.

Annie is close enough that Alex can smell her--not perfume, but the complex odor that makes a person distinguishable from someone else, sweet with an undertone--when she leans in to say in Alex's ear, "We like to make him think he's done all the changing himself."

Alex can't think when she was last close enough to a woman to be aware of how she smelled. It must be unconscious memories coming to the fore--of course they're unconscious memories, under the circumstances, but more so than most. The fully conscious awareness of how utterly sexist and patronizing Annie's words are does not make it better. "Because heaven forfend you should be able to give him good advice and have him listen?" she asks, not keeping her voice down.

Annie straightens up, frowning. "No," she says, with the sort of deliberate calm that makes Alex want to shake her. "No, because it's best not to try to force people to change their minds. Better to do it by showing them the truth, over and over again, without beating their heads on it and shouting, 'Listen up, you pathetic buggers, this is the way things are and no amount of whingeing's going to change it.'"

Someone behind her claps, and someone else laughs--Tyler, when Alex glances up to see, and Skelton, sharing a naughty schoolchildren look as if they're expecting to be caught at it. Hunt's door opens, with the sort of timing he's displayed entirely too many times in the past two days to be strictly plausible. If he weren't a dream, Alex would wonder what he does while he's in there other than listen and think of clever retorts. "You could charge 'em if you did, Cartwright. Five quid a go to have your head knocked in and be told off. They'd be lining up round the block."

Skelton laughs. "Reckon you'd be first in line, eh, boss?" he says to Sam, who looks at Alex, then Annie, before he answers.

"You'd not charge me, would you, love?"

Annie purses her lips for a moment, trying too hard to look as though she's thinking about it. "I reckon you'd owe me a king's ransom by now."

They all laugh at that, except Alex, who doesn't know them well enough to find it all that funny. She'd had enough jokes with people she knew that she recognizes the feel of it--this is how they treat each other, this is the boundary of this relationship, and anyone teasing Sam about Annie will reinforce the rules. At least they haven't used the more distasteful terms for a man who gives the woman in his life respect and honor, yet.

Sam's smiling as though he's comfortable with it. "Do you take in-kind payments?" he asks.

"From you?" Annie goes over to his desk and kisses him, nothing showy, a peck on the cheek.

The rest of the office hoots like they're putting on some kind of a sex show.

Alex stares at them and tries to work out what they all represent. She's got Annie pegged, but Sam is someone in the same predicament she's in. He's settled in, accepted his new role--which Alex hasn't had defined for her exactly, but about which she learns more with every taunt from his co-workers--and found his way to an apparent healthy heterosexuality that makes everyone around him laugh and accept him. Alex hadn't spoken with his former partner, but she had the sense that he'd never had a long-term relationship that went so smoothly.

If Annie is the woman Alex was always meant to be, the femininity she was always meant to express happily and properly, then is this dream telling her she ought to find a good man and settle in?

She thinks of Sam's files, of the desperation that wore off, of the loneliness, and hears Molly's voice in her head, reading to her.

There are no men in any imaginary decade that could keep her from going home, even if it means she has to give up all of the viscerally lovely things about 1981. Alex pushes aside the thought that she might somehow be able to stay and tries not to think of Molly's face.

Molly's face, when Pete couldn't be arsed to send her a birthday present for yet another year, as useless as his sister--Auntie-Carol-who-died to Molly, and only for the space of those necessary conversations "your biological mother." Alex hasn't told her about the note, yet, the one she hides more carefully than anything else.

It's not signed, and Molly probably couldn't pick Pete's handwriting out of a lineup, but no one else would ever write "You're a better mum than I'll ever be a dad" and leave it, leave his daughter and leave the bloody country, the coward. If it had been over anything Alex could control, she would despise him less for it. If it had been for the reason everyone else would say was obvious, she would scorn him, and at least then she would know.

But she frightened him off, not with anything in her mind or her pants, but with the need for him to stay. She knows she has abandonment issues, and she can put her finger on precisely why.

If she had a paper to hand, she could probably do so literally; Tim and Caroline Price's exploits made the news as often as not, whether it was one of the big pieces with a photograph or a few lines about a case won against the forces of Thatcherism, the way they always worked together against the world.

Pete is even farther away than normal, and he was never what happy heterosexuality was going to look like for Alex. She lied to herself when he stuck with her through the hardest bits, when she talked him into taking in his sister's baby daughter and he went along with it, but Pete is no one's perfect man.

Nor is Sam Tyler, to go by her memory of him, but her memory of him is sitting at a desk near enough that Alex could nearly whisper to him, and he looks happy.

He isn't missing Molly, or anyone like her. He's part of Alex's delusions.

Alex looks back at the files in front of herself--preparation for the royal wedding, in case she needed a little more reinforcement of the heterosexual theme, thank you, decade, thank you, reality obsessed with men and women in perfect, tidy pairs--and makes herself keep breathing. Imagines herself keeping breathing, day after day, case after case, until she works out how she's going to get home.

It will be worth everything to see Molly again.  



End file.
